Egypt's former presidential Candidate Ahmed Shafiq told Al Arabiya TV in an interview on Sunday that the infamous dragging and beating of a naked old man near the presidential palace last week was previously planned by the interior ministry to terrorize the people.

Shafiq, who lost the presidential race to Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in a bitterly contested election last year, said the torture of the old man --featured in a widely circulated video -- was meant to send a message of fear to the young men and women protesting in the streets against what they described as a brutal rule of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Shafiq said such torture of the old man was a “new style of exaggerated terrorism used against the Egyptian citizens that will lead only to violence and hatred of the regime.”

Shafiq added that the “current regime is finished,” stressing that the “rigging of the presidential election” will not be let go. “It will not pass easily because they are caught with the wrong person.”

Shafiq said he always called for increased representation of the Brotherhood in the parliament, but that the Islamist movement chose to keep a low profile, strike deal with the Mubarak’s regime in private and claim to be repressed in public.